


Strong Roots

by Saraste



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gigolas Week 3, M/M, Probably misspelled Sindarin and Khuzdul, Sea Longing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 13:09:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5376368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saraste/pseuds/Saraste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Legolas suffers a spell of Sea Longing and Gimli helps him through it.</p>
<p>For day 7 of gigolas week 'aman'. I was a bit creative.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strong Roots

 

Gimli carefully did not think of Aman when Legolas gasped, and shivered, and became unnaturally still. He _didn't._

  


Instead, he took careful hold of his husband's arm and held him close and soothed him with some meaningless nonsense, anything that would come to mind, his words wavering as he spoke them because he was hurting himself. Legolas had once again suffered a bout of sea longing and it made Gimli's heart seize. He did not want to see his love so hurt by such strange a thing.

  


Legolas settled, in the end, but he remained quit afterwards, as he often did. He lay upon their bed like someone coming back from a long illness of the body rather than of mind, which the sea-longing essentially was.

  


Sometimes he spoke, lost himself in the words and looked at Gimli with such intense affection it almost hurt in it's rawness. For Gimli could see his husband warring between his sea longing and the love he had found for a Dwarf, for Gimli.

  


Legolas comes back to him time, is almost himself and smiles and laughs but it is always tainted with the song of the sea, the persistent call of the gulls that whispers of the ocean and the rest found in Aman.

  


Sometimes, when Legolas takes longer to come back to himself, Gimli thinks that maybe he _should_ tell his husband to go. Legolas has not come through the War unscathed and it _hurts_ Gimli to see how his Elf _longs_ to go but refuses to do so. Legolas is silencing a part of himself to linger with Gimli, something which is a blemish on their relationship, for Gimli would not need to deny a part of himself in the way Legolas needs to, even when he compromises with some things.

  


Forests are one thing, at first, that Gimli compromises with because of the love Legolas has for green growing things, especially trees. Fangorn is alive around them as they visit it on what is their honeymoon and it does not make Gimli love trees the way Legolas does, or even somewhere close to it. It is in the Green Wood, in Eryn Lasgalen, the forest which has been Legolas' home for so long, that Gimli _understands_. And he begins to find a love for green growing things in his own way. Legolas always delights in every single new gift that Gimli gives him from his own hands, all carefully and meticulously adorned with leaves and vines.

  


But Gimli understood his love even before that for the wooden beads in Legolas' spouse braids had leaves twining around the crest of the Durin line… and those same beads had been in the same braid when they had been courting braids.

  


*

  


Legolas lays on their bed, eyes open and unfocused. Gimli's voice washes over him and he latches onto it to ground himself to Middle Earth, to tether himself to their love. For him, Gimli is his roots, anchoring him to the soil of the earth below his feet and as long there is life in his Dwarf Legolas _cannot_ uproot himself. Will not. Maybe there will come a day when they might sail to Valinor and Gimli might be granted passage... yet even then they will be separated, for there is no immortality on those shores for Gimli. And then he _wil_ _l_ be left alone to wait for their meeting in the Second Song, and… no. They are still here, Gimli is not even coming on with that much grey in his hair and beard, and Legolas will endure.

  


“Gimli-nin?”

  


“Azyungêl...”

  


And warm arms will tether him to these shores where his roots are already loosening, every endearment a new root for those will eventually snap and break with every spell of sealonging. He is in love with a mortal and so has chosen eventual sorrow. But there is no sorrow in a whiskery warm kiss, nor what follows after, no, there is life.

  


Legolas' roots are strong.

 


End file.
